Selected monographs.

Date:: 1888

Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Selected monographs. Source: Wellcome Collection.

82/440 (page 66)

wliicli must occur immediately, before any possible distur- bance of nutrition can take place, provided that any pressure exists and any filtration goes on. The consequences as affecting the glandular epithelium of the kidney can be esti- mated only according to the analogy of other glands in which secretion and not merely filtration takes place. It is, however, certain that every secretion becomes more scanty as the blood-pressure diminishes. Whether, in cases of simple diminution of blood-pressure, albumen, previously absent, passes into the secretion, has, so far as I know, not as yet been experimentally determined with regard to the liver, the only gland with a non-albuminous secretion suitable for an experiment of this kind. I should, however, think it not improbable, considering the results obtained by occluding an artery for brief intervals and which have been described in a previous page (see p. 59). The result would be different if the congestion were of long duration. Examination of the kidney in this case furnishes no positive explanation, for deposits of albumen are found both in the capsules and in the uriniferous tubules, but this appearance is no irrefragable proof that the albumen is derived from the interstitial capil- laries, for it may have escaped from the capsules into the tubules. On the other band, from the condition of the biliary secretion in the human subject, after prolonged congestion, it may be allowable to draw conclusions as to the secretion of the renal epithelium in similar circumstances. In connec- tion with this, much importance is attached to Frerich's statement (66) that albumen has been found in the bile in several cases of passive hypersemia of the liver. It proves that even in this form of congestion, besides the glomerular system of vessels, the secretory apparatus of the kidney may also yield albumen. But however this may be, the combined results at any rate of the diminution of pressure upon the two soui'ces which participate in the production of urine, must be a considerable diminution in the quantity of that fluid and an increase in the percentage of the albumen it contains. The percentage of albu- men in the fluid yielded by the capsule will now therefore be a + x instead of a; the quantity of the epithelial secretion will be represented hj n-y and therefore the percentage in the